As regular readers might guess, I’m a big fan of tumblr. Most of my images for posts come via tumblers, and I love the way their reblogging and following mechanism makes it easy to walk a network of similar content. I also like the simplicity and uncluttered layout that tumblrs tend to promote. For a site like this one I want the control and security that comes with owning my own domain and running open source software. But if I had any spare time at all, I’d definitely be tempted to set up a tumblr to complement my posts here.
It was therefore disconcerting to read today that Yahoo is going to buy tumblr for $1.1B. That’s not a company with a great track record in acquisitions, as flickr and geocities users will tell you. Large corporations that rely heavily on advertising dollars also do not mesh well with sites heavy in pornographic content. On the positive side Marissa Mayer did promise “not to screw it up”, which at least suggests some self-awareness and understanding of history. However, to avoid the screwing, they have to understand what the ‘it’ actually is, and I wouldn’t bet a dollar on that.
Bacchus has been blogging heavily on this topic in the last few days. So if you have an adult tumblr I’d advise reading his posts on tumblr’s robots.txt behavior, searching your tumblr and backing up your tumblr. In the meantime I’ll leave you with an image from the 11% of adult material on tumblr. I found this on Alternative Femdom. I believe it’s originally by the photographer Valentin Casarsa.
Hi Paltego:
Acquisitions of this type are always a cause for concern. Corporations are usually only concerned with their own self interest. Yahoo is not known for making an abundance of smart business decisions either. Hopefully they will leave tumblr alone and not screw it up. I have my fingers crossed but I wouldn’t bet on it.
I too greatly enjoy the many femdom tumblr sites that provide such wonderful imagery. Thank you for sharing links to so many great tumblr sites on “Femdom Resource”. I benefit from that quite directly as I frequently use your referrals as a resource for the images I use on “Her Majesty’s Plaything”.
Hey hmp,
Yahoo have certainly had their share of bad acquisitions. $5.7B for broadcast.com (wasted) and $3.6B for geocities (wasted) spring to mind. I think Marissa Mayer is pretty smart however, so one can only hope they get it right this time.
Glad the links are useful. I’m constantly amazed at how many femdom tumblrs are out there.
-paltego
My heart sank when I read the news. I remember what happened to YouTube when Google got control of it. A lot of fetish stuff that I liked and collected started to be purged, and the rate at which sites were totally deleted or got discouraged and left, accelerated.
The trouble is that you’ve only got to say the word ‘porn’ in front of a bunch of suits and accountants, and they turn to jelly. They worry about things like ‘corporate image’ (although it doesn’t seem to bother them when they get caught aggressively avoiding paying taxes).
And of course this raises the old chestnut about what constitutes ‘porn’ and what distinguishes it from erotica. Is the picture you’ve posted really pornographic? I don’t think it is in the least. I think it’s tender, moving, and extremely tasteful.
But then, I’m not some corporate group-think plonker in a suit.
Good point, but I think Yahoo is not Google and YouTube is not Tumblr. YouTube is a single site when you can access all the stuff (you only need to search for them or click on recommended videos), so although we are not happy when fetish videos get removed, but it makes sense to protect the children etc.
Tumblr is different IMHO, because every blog has it’s own page, and if you don’t want view the content of a certain blog, you just simply don’t visit the page.
It wouldn’t make sense to ban out the NSFW content…
So I’m still positive and optimistic. (But every time when a small company gets acquired by a big giant, it’s a bit sad…)
There is certainly a tendency to play it safe for large corporations when adult content gets mentioned. Although I think it’s more complicated than just the exec’s worrying about their corporate image. See me latest post for some more thoughts on that angle 🙂
I didn’t really use YouTube prior to Google buying them, but I have observed the problems people using blogspot have had with Google. Random adult blogs have been shutdown there for little reason that I could see.
Glad you liked the shot. I picked it intentionally to be non-pornographic porn 🙂
-paltego
I knew that you will write a post about this. Actually, in the end, from their (Yahoo! and Tumblr) point of view this acquisition could turn out well: both companies have already got their own know-how and infrastructure of managing and maintaining image-hosting websites and communities. I’m sure after the acquisition they will start to integrate tumblr with flickr soon – and depending on how they want to achieve this integration, it could have (hopefully) positive effects on the tumblr community.
These two services can act as two sides of the same coin: flickr is mostly for professional photographers, while tumblr has a distinctive alternative style and it’s own hipster attitude.
But tumblr is mostly about content sharing and reposting, so there is a lot of duplicates. Maybe in the future flickr could provide a lot of original and fresh content for the tumblrers.
I wouldn’t think that they would ban the adult content, because it represents such a large part of the tumblr blogs – and the guys (and girls) at Yahoo are not mad to chase their users away…
BTW, am I the only who found Marissa Mayer sexy? She is pretty clever (although being a blonde, ha-ha), successful and rich. I’m jealous for her. 🙂
In think it theory it could work great. I think in reality the odds are stacked against it. See my latest post for some thoughts on why adult content and large software companies don’t tend to mix well.
If they concentrate on adding useful features without destroying the simplicity of tumblr then it’ll work well. But if they try and ghettoize the porn or go to heavy handed on advertising then they’ll be in trouble.
And I’m a big fan of Marissa Mayer. I’d pretty much written Yahoo off, but she has a chance to turn it around. A lot of the stuff she says seems well thought out. Although I’m still not going to be looking for a job there anytime soon 🙂
-paltego
When you spend more than a billion dollars for something, it had better produce a revenue stream real quick, or drive consumers to something that does. There’s the cause for concern. All the talk about synergies, common platforms, infrastructure and blah blah blah, sounds real nice but it doesn’t mean crap. Cash is king. Keep your fingers crossed.
RW
Well they do have a history of spending a bunch of money and not getting any revenue (see my reply to hmp) 🙂 Lets hope they can avoid killing the goose with the golden eggs this time. Although in this case it’s the goose with a lot of fans but no gold at all!
-paltego
sad to see Tumblr become another Yambler. Thanks for the link to altfemdom.! Get it while you can.
Let’s hope quality tumblr content like this will be available for many years to come!
-paltego